Paul Prescod says:
> When you are trying to move people to a new paradigm, you must make it
> difficult to slip back into the old one. I would guess that that is why
> SmallTalk and Java don't have functions, and why ANSI C has strong type
> checking.
Nice argument, I like it. I am thus somewhat baffled that Paul concludes:
> The proposed STYLE attribute allows you to do your "red", "green", "blue"
> thing and still serves this educational purpose. It seems like a good
> compromise to me.
Are you talking about the style attribute proposal where the value is
a style name, or the one where it is allowed to contain arbitrary
stylesheet declarations?
Because the latter sounds very much like what you warn against:
a) the old one:
<h2 font+=2 face="garamond">
b) what lets you slip back:
<h2 style="{font-size: 3; font-family: garamond}">
c) what makes it "difficult to slip back" or rather, what points the way forward:
<h2 style="section-head"> or
<h2 class="chapter title"> or whatever we end up calling this
hook into stylesheets.
I presume therefore that you are referring to the other proposal, where
the style attribute takes a name only.
--
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C
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